Two months ago, an “Arctic Ready” website appeared online. Festooned with Shell Oil’s logo, it purported to be a site dedicated to educating the public about Shell’s drilling for oil up North. It even included an interactive “ social media” component — an “ad generator” allowing visitors to caption photos supposedly provided by Shell. It looked a lot like Shell’s own Arctic-focused section of its site. But it is and was a fake, created by anti-Shell groups —Greenpeace and the Yes Men. And despite the fact that it has been reported as fake repeatedly, visitors continue to be duped by it and so it continues to generate controversy for Shell.

Guess which one is the fake Shell site?

Last month, Greenpeace, the Yes Men, and members of the Occupy movement used YouTube to make a supposed Shell event gone horribly wrong — that they had staged — go viral. This week, they created a fake Shell “social media response team” Twitter account to make ads generated by their Arctic Ready website go viral. The account pretended to be frantically trying to contain the spread of ads created on the fake site. Those drawn to the site, thinking it was real, thought it was a case of social media going horribly wrong, with “Shell’s” ad generator resulting in “embarrassing” ads like these… Read More